Page 69 of Vengeance in Venice
Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
Constance breathed again, but the man was too unpredictable for her to relax entirely. Though he seemed about to disprove one of their theories.
“Her face obsessed me,” he said suddenly. “So does yours. I cannot love all my obsessions. I have reality.”
“Adriana.”
A smile flickered across his lips. “I should marry her.” He sighed. “And I should drink less to make her marry me.”
“Why don’t you?”
“That,” said the artist, “is a very good question. I like to drink. And when I don’t paint, when my own lack of talent scares me… I drink and it doesn’t matter. Until I wake up.”
“Do you tell Adriana this?”
He plucked at his coat as though suddenly too warm. “No. But I think she knows. She knows everything.”
“Even that you don’t always remember?”
It was a risk to bring up that subject again, but he only shrugged. “Probably.”
Questions tried to force themselves from her lips, but she knew better than to hurry him at this moment. Theyalmostunderstood each other, and she couldn’t take the chance of ruining that.
His gaze swept suddenly back to hers. “You want to know, don’t you? If I went back to the palazzo to fight with Savelli? I might have. I might not. When he sent me away that day, I gotvilely, stupidly drunk. Adriana shut her door on me, and who can blame her? I woke up in my studio the next morning, as if I hadn’t moved. But I had. My clothes were filthy and wet, as if I’d fallen in a canal or a puddle and rolled about the streets. I had bruises, but whether someone punched me or I fell over and hurt myself, I don’t know.
“Dreams from that night came back to me, full of my anger against Savelli. There was blood. It didn’t feel real, but I don’t know if it was or not. Other people were in the dream too. Premarin, trailing after his plain young wife. I knew it was her even though she was veiled and hooded.”
“How did you know?” Constance asked.
“The way she moved.”
“Where were they when you saw them?”
“Somewhere beside the Grand Canal. On foot.” His eyes widened. “Close to the Palazzo Savelli…”
It seemed to Constance that there had been so many people close to the Palazzo Savelli that night, it was a miracle they hadn’t fallen over each other. Giusti, Premarin, Bianca Premarin, Rossi. To say nothing of Savelli’s wife and the household who had seen and heard nothing.
A few steps forward and then snapped back to the beginning.
And Rossi didn’t even know whether or not he was guilty.
“In your dream,” she said suddenly, “when you attacked Savelli and there was all that blood, did you have a weapon? How were you hurting him?”
He grimaced but didn’t need to think about it. “With my old palette knife. Is it not symbolic?”
At last. Constance smiled at him, and he looked momentarily dazzled. “Symbolic of your innocence. I think we have both been afraid your dream was not a dream but a drunken memory of drunken rage. But it can’t have been a true memory becauseyou used a palette knife. That isn’t what killed him. Your dream was only a dream. You didn’t actually kill Savelli. It is quite a distinction, since the evidence seems to rule out no one else in Venice.”
*
“He could belying,” Solomon said judiciously.
He had come home in something of a panic, shortly after Rossi’s departure, and Constance, back indoors in the drawing room and sipping weak tea, had immediately poured out her encounter with the artist.
“I don’t believe he is,” she said.
“You are usually right,” he allowed. “And we don’t believe either Elena or Giusti were lying either. We just have to bear in mind that we like these people and don’t want them to be guilty.”
She had not told him of her sudden sense of threat in Rossi’s company. It no longer seemed important, since it had vanished like a summer rain shower. “What of Premarin?”
